Pre-Greek languages

[Stanley Friesen]

At 06:26 PM 10/13/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Stanley Friesen wrote:

>> [The northern group would be ancestral to Germanic, Celtic, and Italic, at
>> least, and perhaps Balto-Slavis as well],

>You must be new on this list; during August and September, the question of
>the phylogeny of the IE languages was hashed over in great detail.  I'm
>curious as to what linguistic and archaeological evidence you have in
>mind; your claim is at odds with the work of Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor
>which I have been discussing.  If you like, I can forward you some of the
>emails which I sent out as a part of this dialog.

That would help.

However, I have some issues with accepting such a result.  The biggest
blocker to my mind is the very early date for the beginning of the Corded
Ware cultures in northern Europe.  This complex seems, to me, to be very
strongly IE in character.  And it is too far from the Ukraine for the
possibility of it remaining the same language.  So, unless it represents a
now extinct branch of the IE family, this puts the split between at least
some of the northern European IE languages subfamilies back to about 3500
BC or so.  Given that PIE unity is dated at not much earlier than that,
this leaves precious little time for Anatolian to have already split off.
Indeed the beginning of the Cernavoda-Ezero complex of the Balkans actually
seems to date a couple of centuries later, and this seems, to me, to be the
most likely pre-Anatolian culture, given its association with the lower
layers of Troy.

On the linguistic side, Hittite itself seems to be somewhat abberrant even
*within* Anatolian, so any phylogenetic analysis probably needs to
cross-check any features encoded for Anatolian with the other languages in
the group.  (I ran across an indication the other day that the other
Anatolian languages had a more typical IE verbal system, for instance).
Overall, I think this makes Anatolian somewhat less deviant within the
family than it seems at first glance.

>> And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
>> through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
>> in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
>> language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

>If the speakers of prehistoric Anatolian travelled south along the west
>coast of the Black Sea to the Bosporus, they need not have entered any
>part of what is now Greece on their way into Anatolia.

True, but the Greeks would have had to pass through somewhere close there
as well.  (Though they seem to have gone rather further west, at least
based on the NW dialects).  On the other hand, the Cernavoda-Ezero complex
does extend west into the area the Greeks probably had to pass through.

The key point is that there appear to be some IE place names in Greecce
that cannot be interpreted as Greek.  This means that *some* IE group had
to precede the Greeks there, even if it wasn't the Anatolians.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com